Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Studies for the Libyan Sibyl and a small Sketch for a Seated Figure (verso), ca. 1510–1511
Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian)
Red chalk, with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the figure in the main study (recto); soft black chalk, or less probably charcoal (verso)
Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924 (24.197.2)

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Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Studies for the Libyan Sibyl and a small Sketch for a Seated Figure (verso), ca. 1510–1511
Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian)
Red chalk, with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the figure in the main study (recto); soft black chalk, or less probably charcoal (verso)
Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924 (24.197.2)

I look at this drawing almost

every day.

I feel fully that five hundred years fall away,

that I am looking over

Michelangelo’s shoulder as he

works with this extraordinary

freshness. This represents an idea in process

for the greatest masterpiece in the world, the Sistine Ceiling.

What we see is a boy, the studio model, posing for a figure that is going to be a female, the figure of the Libyan Sibyl.

In fact, the black chalk sketch

on this backside of the sheet,

because of the roughness, it’s the

first step for the figure that he tries out. And then he turns the sheet

to work in the more refined way with the red chalk. I can see him starting very

tentatively on the sheet, blocking out the head without much detail at all and then the musculature of the shoulders and the ribs,

and tries out the head of the boy. He’s an artist who thinks profoundly in a structural way, so that

the poses have to make sense as a whole. It's almost like an engineer of the figure. I mean to repeat

the toes

three times, one

begins to see that the figure is going to be resting much of the body’s

weight on those toes.

One can see in the pentimenti, the tentative outlines where Michelangelo's piece of chalk went first on the paper.

Michelangelo notes with the little circles on either

side of the shoulders the precise point where those muscles occur, and

then indicates with a little bit of white chalk the spot that is going to get the greatest highlight.

He puts the numeral three to indicate

the three ribs that exist there. Very tentatively, he begins sketching a bust with a nipple for the figure

because this will become a woman. What the drawing

here captures is still the personality of the boy model who was before him.

I can see the humanity in a way, the figure breathing.

With raking light the drawing becomes almost like a sculpture,

like a relief.

The organic searching of the

form reveals the

hand of the master, almost as if it were a kind of handwriting. It is so private.

There is something tremendously arresting about the process of the artist’s hand working on the paper and